Musings on Digital Identity

Archive for October, 2010

Having a simple discovery method for services and resources is key to enabling many Internet scenarios that require interactions among parties that do not have pre-established relationships. For instance, if Joe, with e-mail address joe@example.com, wants to share his calendar with Mary, then Mary’s calendar service, in the general case, will need to discover the location of Joe’s calendar service. For example, Mary’s calendar service might discover that Joe’s calendar service is located at http://calendars.proseware.com/calendar/joseph by doing discovery for a service named urn:adatum.com:calendar at example.com for the account joe.

Yaron Goland and I are submitting this Simple Web Discovery (SWD) draft for consideration by the community to address this need. SWD is simple to understand and implement, enables different permissions to be applied to discovery of different services, and is JSON-based. I look forward to discussing this with many of you next week at IIW.

I’ve produced a new JSON token draft based on a convergence proposal discussed with the authors of the other JSON signing proposals. I borrowed portions of this draft with permission from Dirk Balfanz, John Bradley, John Panzer, and Nat Sakimura, and so listed them as co-authors. (You shouldn’t take their being listed as authors as their blanket endorsement of its content, but I appreciate their willingness to let me build upon their work.)

Hopefully we can develop consensus positions on these and any other issues found during IIW. This doc is intended as a further step in that direction.